Samsara

"I guess I should have stayed in bed
My pillow wrapped around my head
Instead of waking up to find
A nightmare of a different kind"
-- The Monkees

I have a friend who is a bit of an adventurer, whether trekking around Everest or rafting the Futaleafu. It seems a trek last year was cancelled for regional unrest, so he decided to do a pair of Alaskan river tours, coupled with some time at Denali.

The staging area for one of the treks was Arctic Village, where they were greeted at the airport by a neglected poodle with a broken leg that would spend his days chasing planes on the runway. Named Snack Shack by the group (after what was clearly the previous use of the airport terminal), one of the guides decided to stage a clandestine rescue operation, and had the dog smuggled back to Fairbanks aboard an outbound plane and taken to a local animal clinic.

When the group returned from the Alaskan wild, they learned than Snack Shack needed to have the broken leg amputated, and so the guide gave permission. Snack Shack recovered well, and later joined the guide on a documentary retracing the river explorations of John Muir.

The dog and new owner flew back to California, where it would be nice to say that they lived happily ever after. But instead, the guide's long wait on a permit to swim the Grand Canyon finally came through, and so she packed up her boogie board and spent the next three weeks swimming 230 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, while Snack Shack got some much needed rest with one of the guide's friends.

One night - and it's not clear if this was before or after the owner's return - Snack Shack was let outside to do what doggies do outside, and the poor poodle was killed by a coyote.

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